This 2014 staff file photo shows a homeless person camping out in a makeshift tent near the intersection of 6th and San Julian streets in Los Angeles. (Photos by John McCoy/Los Angeles Daily News/File)

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has backed away from his pledge to end veteran homelessness this year.

Speaking with the Los Angeles News Group editorial board, Garcetti said Thursday the effort might take an additional six months, and that not all homeless veterans will actually be housed.

His recalibration underscores the enormity of the problem in Los Angeles and the challenges facing homeless service providers. L.A. organizations have housed more than 3,700 homeless veterans since January 2014, according to a recent city tally, but have more than 2,600 remaining. A growing population, obstacles at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and inaction at City Hall have worsened the situation, some say.

“We won’t have ‘no homeless vet in Los Angeles’ when we declare victory,” Garcetti said, “but what we will have is a system to rapidly rehouse every homeless vet that we can find.”

Garcetti said the city was on track to reach his goal by March or April but said it may take until “the beginning of the summer.”

The delay, he said, was partially because the city was waiting for the VA to add more homeless case workers. At the VA’s West Los Angeles campus, officials have been working on a master plan for housing and services to treat the region’s veterans.

While top VA administrators and local field workers are making an effort, the agency’s middle-management has hampered progress, said Gary Blasi, a retired UCLA law professor who has worked on veteran homelessness for decades.

“A lot of resources have come to Los Angeles from the VA and the VA here has made a lot of changes,” Blasi said. “But it is still a bureaucracy that is not high-functioning.”

VA spokesman Michael Huff said in a statement that the VA appreciates the mayor’s efforts and works closely with his administration, but he did not address the mayor’s projections.

Other U.S. cities that achieved the 2015 goal had much smaller homeless populations. New Orleans, the first major city to fulfill the national pledge, housed 227 veterans between January 2014 and January 2015. Garcetti made the pledge in July 2014, at an event with first lady Michelle Obama.

L.A. housed more veterans than any other city in the country since the beginning of 2014, Garcetti spokeswoman Connie Llanos said in an email Friday. U.S. cities including L.A. are working toward “functional zero,” not an actual elimination of the problem, she said. That would mean the monthly number of veterans landing on the street would be no greater than the number of housing placements.

But the White House lays out the objectives in a fact-sheet: “Achieving this goal means that veterans are not sleeping on our streets, all veterans in shelter or transitional housing are connected to permanent housing, and communities have systems in place to prevent and end future homelessness among veterans quickly and efficiently, ensuring that it is a rare, brief and nonrecurring experience.”

“We thought it was impossible when they said it to begin with,” said Francisco Juarez, chairman of the state land use committee for Amvets, a veterans advocacy group, and an activist at the West L.A. campus. “At least the mayor has the intelligence to change it correctly and admit it himself.”

Juarez said homeless veterans are reluctant to enter the system because they don’t trust government, particularly the VA, which has been embroiled in recent scandals over health care and misspent resources.

Garcetti appealed to the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee in July for more funding to meet the goal by the end of 2015. He said the city needed an additional $5.1 million. In March, the VA announced $30 million in grants to support homeless services in the L.A. area.

But some of the delay could also be blamed on city inaction, said Blasi, the retired UCLA professor. About 700 homeless service members in L.A. have federal housing vouchers but have been unable to find apartments, he said. The city housing authority could lean on relationships with landlord groups and use its database of apartments to find them housing, he said.

“This is an area where the city could be doing a lot,” Blasi said.

Meanwhile, the number of homeless veterans is climbing. The mayor’s office estimates that four or five veterans become homeless in the city each day.

Since 2013, the number of homeless veterans increased by 6 percent, according to the figures released in May by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

“We discovered that the numbers of homeless veterans in Los Angeles were substantially larger than we and homelessness experts had anticipated — and growing at a steadily increasing rate,” Llanos said.

Despite the setbacks, Garcetti said he continues to promote the 2015 pledge. In his July 29 letter to the Senate, Garcetti said the city could meet the challenge with the additional funds.

“I’m still pushing everybody to try and do it by the end of the year, and to push Washington to get us the resources,” Garcetti told the editorial board.

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